The Ladies Re: Just Kidding
posted by on March 3 at 11:32 AM
If I was the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, I’d just quietly repudiate Charlotte Allen’s idiotic op/ed (which argued, in part, that women are “stupid” and should learn to “not mind the fact that way down deep, we are … kind of dim”). Something simple, like, “Although the Washington Post’s policy is to present a range of opinions, we recognize the difference between a legitimate opinion and a categorical insult targeted at an entire class of people. We would never have run such an op/ed had it been directed at a certain race or religious group. We regret the error in judgment.”)
Instead, they’re calling it a joke.
Uh-huh.
For context, here’s Allen in 2001, writing about Laura Doyle’s controversial book “The Surrendered Wife”:
For example, Doyle advises: “Let your husband handle the finances.” I’ve been doing that for years, as I can’t add or subtract. The last time I even tried to balance my checkbook was in 1989. Let him take the wheel of the car, Doyle admonishes, and “don’t correct him by telling him where to turn.” Fine by me—I hate to drive, and I’d rather look at the scenery than keep track of a bunch of damn street signs. Doyle says you should say, “I need the help of a big strong man,” when you want him to lift something large and heavy that you don’t feel like lifting. Got a problem with that, Betty Friedan? I don’t. “Make yourself available at least once a week” for marital sex, even if you don’t feel like it. What? Only once a week?
Here she is in 2002, writing about an aspiring female firefighter who challenged the NYFD’s physical fitness test:
We want our firefighters to be able to carry victims out of harm’s way in their arms if need be, and our soldiers to be able to go hand to hand against a murderous enemy.Sorry, Brenda Berkman (and we appreciate your efforts on September 11), but sometimes, perhaps most of the time, those are jobs that only a guy can do, and if we lower our standards because some women may feel bad about not living up to them, it is going to cost lives. It took an act of monstrous criminality to show us this, but we now know that the crisis of masculinity is over and some of the worst excesses of affirmative action may be over. We’ve come to appreciate that there’s nothing like a guy.
And here she is in 2005, responding to Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ assertion that men predominate in science because of innate differences between the sexes :
Even if you’re not up on the scientific research – a paper Mr. Summers cited demonstrating that, while women overall are just as smart as men, significantly fewer women than men occupy the very highest intelligence brackets that produce scientific genius – common sense tells you that Mr. Summers has got to be right. …Asserting that men and women are innately identical is, in strictly scientific terms, like asserting (as the Nazis did) that Jews are an inferior race or (as the Marxists did) that the history of the world can be explained as a process of class struggle.
Let’s remember, also, that this is the woman who wrote an editorial titled “Why Are Airline Flight Attendants So Awful—and So Ugly?”; made fun of “radical leftist” college courses like critical race theory and “nonviolent responses to terrorism”; and suggested that women who don’t want to become “bag ladies” should shut up and get married. What a kidder!
Airline flight attendants became awful and ugly when they stopped being stewardesses.
Wait, so am I sexist now for thinking that Firefighters should have an absolute level of physical strength and stamina they're required to meet? God, I'm such a dick.
Kick her ass, ECB!
aint reality offensive?
@2: Right on.
Erica, I think you picked the wrong section of the article to highlight when you've got gems like "Then this thing called September 11 happened" and "grizzled, mustachioed veteran fireman."
It really does read fucking godawful. The way she fawns over the brawny man-hero -- and seems to paint heroic civic service as an exclusively masculine quality -- is embarrassing to read.
When I read the part about 'I can add 2 and 2.. but then what?' I thought it might be a gag. So I Googled Charlotte Allen and saw that yes, indeed, she has been saying this kind of thing for years. Apparently she means it. Considering she speaks for the same subculture who thought Iraq had something to to with Al Qaeda terrorism, it isn't that far fetched that she is serious.
Which is why I still think it's useful to read what people like this think in a major newspaper. Not everybody who wants to know what the wingnuts are thinking wants to go and dig this stuff up on obscure web sites.
But now, the WaPO trying to say it was all a satire is just sad.
BTW, am I the only one who remembers reading newspaper editorials in support of The Bell Curve? The idea that you can't say races have different abilities but you can say it about sex is not true. And I would rather debate it in the paper than make it a taboo discussion.
@2
The fat police who regularly go after Savage are going to go after you now for discriminating against them and their ability as firefighters. Can't run? Can't control the hose? Can't carry an adult woman out of a burning house? Can't lift a 500-lb man back into his bed? No problem! Fat lazy people can be firefighters too.
This is all reminding me of The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi, which I just finished reading. A fascinating - and of course depressing - read. That lady is a maniac.
Guess you showed her! (Even if she was an easy target for your shitstorm attack). And here everybody thought it was just because you have no sense of humor! As for the rest of you out there who might think differently than EB, you, too, could be hunted down and electronically waterboarded for departing from the femmie agenda! There's no escaping the shitfuckpissbitchasshole keyboard onslaught! Ladies, think alike! You have been warned.
It appears that Charlotte Allen is talking about herself as being 'dim' - and then proving it by extrapolating her observations of herself to her entire group. Let's follow that logic - if you judge by Barak Obama then all black men are intelligent and articulate. Using a sample that consists entirely of Ted Bundy we learn that all white men are serial killers - or if the sample consists of George W. Bush, all white men are aggressive idiots with daddy issues.
I'm white, female and blonde - so all female blondes must be intelligent, award-winning engineers in leadership positions with control over millions of dollars of state funds. Yeah, right.
The article tells us nothing about women, but speaks volumes about Allen. And I must agree with her premise - she truly is a 'stupid' individual. But that isn't news.
She woulda totally gotten stabbed in my Sociology of Marriage and Family class.
Oh man, I'm having a PTSD flasback now to one of the lesbians in my class going on an accurate tirade about the inherent destructiveness of the phallo-centric patriarchy. (HINT: It's not OK, it's not OK!). Hold me!!
"This is why you see men honking car-horns, yelling from construction sites. These are the best ideas we've had so far... The car-horn-honk, is that a beauty? Have you seen men doing this? What is this? The man is in the car, the woman walks by the front of the car, he honks.
This man is out of ideas."
Thank you, Erica, for sticking with this. The kind of misogynistic bullshit spread by Allen and condoned by the Post makes us crazy too.
None of the WaPo readers agree that it's a joke - they're very highly offended and many hundreds have posted to say exactly that.
There is no end to that woman's inanity. It's such a terrible thing to let women be firefighters, even as Berkman worked her way up to be a lieutenant and worked her ass off on 9/11.
Thank you for providing extended context and explicit reasoning in your anger over the piece. With this added information (and the lack of petulant lashings-out at male pasttimes), I can support you in your opposition to this asshat.
Hopefully I'll have fewer people wishing my death in this thread.
On a side note; a student newspaper I often read at my campus uses this excuse... "You're offended? We just did it for laughs! You just missed the humor." This non-apology often follows pieces by serial offenders with a proven track record of bias.
It's the writer's fault if the humor fails: satire should be so over the top as to show the absurdity of a certain viewpoint. This fails in that aspect by being similar enough to earnest expressions of this sexism to read indistinguishably from said sexism.
Schweighsr hits the nail on the head: a point Erica could have mentioned in the original post – the author is attributing her sample's characteristics (her own stupid ass) to the entire population (women at large). Any such generalization is clearly bullshit.
To clarify: This person is stupid and sexist, which is orthogonal to her gender.
Erica, I always enjoy reading your posts. Thanks!
Hasn't this vein of outrage been exhausted, yet?
C'mon! Yous dudes truely don' know hows to take a joke! That last line from the first quote: "Only once a week?" is fucking hilarious! You don' think that's funny? Really?
Isn't it obvious that this is a schtick? I can actually detect a hint of Jonathan Swift in there somewhere...
You know, I was going to write about Rosalind Franklin... but I think @10 said it best.
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